W A L T E R W E E RB E T W E E N 0 A N D 1 / S C U L P T U R E
Basel 2009
WHEN FORMATION and decay, construction and deconstruction clash, this is often a drastic process in
today's feel-good and high-gloss society. Nothing can arouse such a feeling of bleakness and desolate
chaos as a glance behind the façade of luxurious health-and-beauty temples and glossy gourmet
restaurants, nothing is more deflating than the flimsy inner life, made on the cheap, of an electrical
device packaged in the latest design. And fruit, overblown to bursting point for the market, oversized,
overgrown roses, their beauty already bearing within it their rapid decay, manifest how the fault line
between rise and fall can split wide open. This is the point of departure for Walter Weer with his
objects of string, cardboard and paper. When the artist works on a box, he destroys its original function
by cutting it up so that only the skeleton of the box is left. With each act of formal dissolution he
constructs a new object, which, cloaked in the guise of an "art object", leads an existence divested
of all obligation. The transition from 0 to 1 precisely targets the very state that hovers between
formation and decay, which is only optimal if something was "set right" by the formed object; the
something that causes the inner isolation of a contemporary society oriented on a superficially
perfect world of appearances. Weer's rectangular string things forming fictional boxes, glued with
shreds of paper and coated over with plaster of Paris delineate this approach: torn, shredded paper
as a major element of everyday detritus is infused by means of the imagination with enduring life.
Walter Weer is a collector with the instinct partly of a detective. For decades, he has been
collecting string and threads of natural fibre, cardboard boxes and various kinds of paper, also wood,
wire, metal and plastic. For collecting and hoarding are integrated, creative acts involved in producing
works of art and take their place at the start of the work process.
These are only seemingly "simple" materials, yet multiple stories germinate within each
piece: firstly, the frequently complicated story of acquisition, then, behind this, the great abundance
of potential and actual stories entwining themselves as such around the strings and boxes. Common
to both is the fact that they are useful carriers of human possessions or even of human beings
themselves, without which the transport – including shipping (ropes, hawsers, rigging, etc...) – of all
sorts of goods would not be possible. Suddenly the compiled materials are endowed with great, seminal
density and an enigmatic quality, which allow everything we could do with them to adhere to them,
like maginary stories. This is the secret of the poetry expressed by Weer's sculptural objects: it is immanent
in the material and, because of this very detachment from function and the new context the
boxes, paper and string are placed in, opens up far-reaching scope for associative thought. This "sets
right" the void, flatness and lack of imagination, indeed lack of life in today's consumer
products, which in their sophistication and their artificial, ideal form deprive the human imagination
of its nourishing soil.
SONJA TRAAR

WA L T E R W E E RB E T W E E N 0 A N D 1

In the course of time, the artist has developed various forms that transcend the shape of the box per
se; for instance, the creels he started making in the early 1990s, hanging freely in space alienated
from their function, often dipped in plaster. Likewise, the artist creates wheel shapes from sliced cardboard
tubes. Also part of his repertoire are the cardboard strips falling down cascade-like, or the roll
pictures – large-scale watercolour roll paintings scrolled down from above. Then there are the strips
of cardboard and knotted string linked together to form a chain. The artist also uses paint (mostly
black, white and red tones), subtly supplementing and completing the created forms. Moreover, the
colour emphasises the aesthetic properties of the objects. Colouration introduces a further stage of
setting things right; the object is now clearly defined as an art object and, having at last attained this
level, is recalled: to the origins of artistic composition, painting and drawing. "My objects are like drawings
in space", says the artist. In this way the act of conquering and creating space, starting out from
the plane, is given a new quality by Weer's works.
In his latest works, Walter Weer subjects power and victory symbols to a critical process of
reconfiguration. Conceived as large-scale objects, they consist of wooden rods and ladders clad in
paper. Out of these the artist builds, for example, a "triumphal arch": the paper hangs down in shreds
and seems to be the only thing to have survived time's vicissitudes – an allusion to preserved documentation
and tradition. The idea of the "Arc de Triomphe" is thus taken ad absurdum. In another large
object, paper-clad ladders are dovetailed into each other; the entire construction seems about to
collapse any minute – the ephemerality of civilisations and world pictures becomes palpable.
Two concepts in the context of Walter Weer's works seem to lend themselves to a detailed description:Lightness and Space.
The artist himself frequently talks of aspiring to a kind of lightness in his works, a state of breathing
and hovering. This is first and foremost arrived at by successively voiding superfluous material,
whereby the "superfluous" is eliminated as gloom, stuffiness and construction. Divested of their function
by their hovering state, they also throw off the ballast of being bound to function. Despite this, as soon
as they hang hovering on the wall, the objects fall into a newer associative thicket and are thus only
seemingly unloaded: the thicket, the undergrowth of the quest for meaning, of the multiple
one-way streets of thought and of ideas burdened with associations. Also the essence of the objects,
completely devoid of symbolism, and their immutability and finality shift them into a proximity to
death. This is the price the lightness in Walter Weer's works has to pay, for only through their
pendant are they controlled, held together and simultaneously freed as if by astronomic influences.
The space that Weer's works take up seems defined by three sequences of movement: stillness,
flow and concentric circles. The volume of the original material, as with the cut-up and painted boxes,
wheels or creels, remains at once preserved and stripped naked. The space thus created is
already prescribed by the object itself and is lovingly held together by strings and box skeleton.
Interior and exterior space are separated. Then again, objects such as roll papers and cardboard strips
dropping like window blinds, split the space wide open and describe an undulating flow of energy
which runs from above to below and vice versa. Taken all together, the objects describe a circular
spatial movement which revolves around a spherical centre. The centre is where the artist is situated.
He defines smaller and larger exteriors round about him, like a net spun around a middle point. Thus
in every exhibition of Walter Weer's works we get the immediate impression of an imaginary, existing
centrepoint, around which all the sculptural objects are meticulously arranged.
The threads picked up time and again by Walter Weer are threads of a universe. Collected
over many years, left to lie, maturing in significance and picked up once more, integrated into the work
machinery and guided to their purpose: just like life and all its actions.
Paradoxically, the spaces that are created seem crystalline: transparently shimmering and precise;
wrought of shredded paper , thick traces of colour, string, rope and bits of cardboard.
Mag. Sonja Traar is curator of The Essl Collection